CHUCK'S ARCHIVED BLOG POSTS

Category: Research

  • Summer Research: It’s About Time

    Summer Research: It’s About Time

    Mid-summer is here, and it’s been a busy few weeks for my undergraduate research students. The 2018-19 William & Mary Structural Geology & Tectonics Research Group is focused on an array of projects with study sites from Europa (the satellite) to Oman and Virginia. This year we’re working to better understand when significant tectonic events…

  • Geology’s Senior Research Saturday 2018: Standing Room Only

    Geology’s Senior Research Saturday 2018: Standing Room Only

    The 3rd Saturday in April is a big day in the William & Mary Geology department as it is Senior Research Saturday, a day in which the Geology seniors present the results of their thesis research to our departmental community and the public. The day-long symposium includes oral presentations, some lively question-and-answer exchanges, a catered…

  • Rising from the Coastal Plain: A Proper Mt. William & Mary!

    Rising from the Coastal Plain: A Proper Mt. William & Mary!

    Over the years I’ve used this blog to report on geologic research in a format that’s intended to be both accessible and digestible by a wide audience. This post highlights an exciting new research finding, and explores the intriguing possibilities for William & Mary that could come from this ground-breaking discovery. First, a little background:…

  • Inside the Ghubrah Bowl, Oman: dropstones, double-duckbills, and pencil structures, oh my!

    Inside the Ghubrah Bowl, Oman: dropstones, double-duckbills, and pencil structures, oh my!

    In early January, with two of my research students, we escaped winter’s cold by heading to the Sultanate of Oman for a week of field research. Oman is a delightful place, and even more so in January with its warm temperatures and cheery sunshine. What follows is the first of three posts that will highlight…

  • From the Tunnel to the Temple

    From the Tunnel to the Temple

    The W&M Geology Department’s spring field trip dashed out of Williamsburg on Saturday for a one-day jaunt from the Tunnel to the Temple. The tunnel is the Blue Ridge Tunnel that Claudius Crozet engineered beneath Rockfish Gap in the 1850s. The temple is the LOTUS (Light Of Truth Universal Shrine) temple that forms the centerpiece…

  • Stand and Deliver: W&M Geology leads the Virginia Geological Field Conference

    Stand and Deliver: W&M Geology leads the Virginia Geological Field Conference

    I spent the front end of Fall Break herding more than 100 geologists across the Blue Ridge at the 47th Virginia Geological Field Conference. It is an annual meeting of academics, professionals, students, and rockhounds that gather to learn about new geological research in the Commonwealth. It was a special trip for me as two…

  • A Decade’s Worth of Field Britches

    A Decade’s Worth of Field Britches

    It’s mid-summer, and it is time for geological fieldwork with my undergraduate research students. As I’ve written before, geologists commonly go to the field to collect their primary data, and for William & Mary geologists, summer is a prime time to gather field data for Senior Research projects. The prudent geologist wears pants in the…

  • North by Northeast to Norway: W&M Geology in the Lofoten Archipelago

    North by Northeast to Norway: W&M Geology in the Lofoten Archipelago

    W&M just finished its graduation celebration, and, as is a yearly tradition in the days after graduation, the Geology Department’s Regional Field Geology course (GEO 310) is off. This year we are headed in a different direction – as we’re traveling north by northeast to Norway, and we’ll be north of the Arctic Circle in…

  • The High and the Low

    The High and the Low

    The past month has been a blur as I’ve been away from campus most weekends doing geology with William & Mary students. I’m way behind getting these adventures posted, and this is the first in a series of posts intended to help me climb out of this virtual hole in the blogosphere. It’s been nearly…

  • Over Nottoway Falls

    Over Nottoway Falls

    Another glorious February weekend, and I was off, once again, to the field with my research students. On this trip we returned to the Falls of the Nottoway River to obtain more measurements and complete our mapping of this awesome exposure in the middle the Southside Virginia Piedmont. We brought a small friend with us,…

  • Power-washing the Paleozoic Petersburg Pluton

    Power-washing the Paleozoic Petersburg Pluton

    300 million years ago, vast quantities of magma intruded the Earth’s crust deep beneath what would one day become Richmond, Virginia. The magma that reached the surface fed a legion of volcanoes which no doubt erupted their fiery wrath over Ol’ Virginny, but much of that magma crystallized at depth, forming granite with its distinctive…

  • Knickpoint on the Nottoway

    Knickpoint on the Nottoway

    Deep in the heart of Southside Virginia lies a bedrock outcrop of tremendous size. Quality outcrops are rare in the Piedmont, but between the communities of Victoria and Crewe the Nottoway River tumbles over sloping bedrock ledges making a dramatic knickpoint that exposes acres of granitic gneiss in the channel. The Nottoway River is a…

  • Summer Solstice in the Field: A River on Rock

    Summer Solstice in the Field: A River on Rock

    Summer is not a quiet time in the William & Mary Geology department. Pop onto the 2nd floor of McGlothlin-Street Hall this summer and you’ll find a bevy of undergraduates pursuing research on an array of topics including paleoclimatology, geochemistry, petrology, hydrology, paleontology, coastal geology, and structural geology. After a few weeks of indoor work,…

  • Comfortably Disoriented in the Blue Ridge Mountains

    Comfortably Disoriented in the Blue Ridge Mountains

    Note: this post was written last September after the Fall 2015 Geology Department field trip, however it never got posted. As the Spring semester comes to a close I thought it was time to stop being a slacker and post this long overdue field trip report! Last week I spent much time at administrative meetings…

  • 4th Rock from the Sun: Human Exploration of Mars – the Planetary Geology Research Projects 2016

    4th Rock from the Sun: Human Exploration of Mars – the Planetary Geology Research Projects 2016

    Forty years ago, in the summer of 1976, NASA placed two spacecraft in orbit around Mars and then safely got the Viking 1 and 2 landers to the surface. I was all of 8 years old, but have a distant memory of those the first images from the Martian surface being broadcast over the evening…